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Rio Winds Down After Carnival.
By Reuters
Contributed by Rachelle Austin
Rio De Janeiro
February 25, 1998
Life began returning to normal in
Rio Tuesday after the delirium of two nights of Carnival
parades, but in some corners of the city resilient drummers were
still hammering the thumping beat of samba.
Hundreds of glamorous transvestites, gliding by in brilliant
white bridal gowns or wiggling in bikinis, gathered near the
beachfront in Ipanema for the huge gay street party which every
year sees Carnival out.
``Stop Carnival? Just when we were starting to have fun?''
lamented a burly and bearded air hostess squeezed into a tight
dress and wheeling a matching travel bag.
Rio's Carnival, which began amid fears of floods and
blackouts, has been a roaring success. Foreign tourists shrugged
off fears of crime and flooded into the city packing hotels
which in previous years were half-empty.
Many paid hundreds of dollars to don sequins and
feathers
and parade with the famous samba schools to the cheers of 70,000
spectators in the Sambadrome stadium.
``I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be singing,''
said Keith Mottram from England. ``But the people around me just
took me by the hand, spun me when I needed to spin and it was
brilliant fun.''
Jan Fairley, a Scottish musicologist, said some people from
her samba school passed out in the heat during a pre-parade
crush in the streets outside the stadium.
``But once we were inside it was fantastic. You can really
cast off your inhibitions because no one's looking at you on
your own, you're part of the whole thing,'' Fairley said,
resting her sore feet on a chair.
From sunset Monday until just before dawn Tuesday, nearly
30,000 dancers and drummers from seven samba schools marched the
length of the half-mile-long avenue of the Sambadrome.
In contrast to Sunday's parades, which some samba fans said
lacked creativity, the mood in the stadium on the second and
final night was electric.
A huge cheer went up as Chico Buarque, Brazil's revered
singer and songwriter, cruised by on a float, surrounded by the
octogenarian founders of Rio's most famous samba school
Mangueira which this year paid hommage to Buarque.
But it was reigning champions Viradouro who had the
grandstands wobbling beneath leaping fans, flirting with
controversy as they momentarily switched from samba into the
immensely popular ``funk'' beat of Rio's shantytown dancehalls.
``Champions! Champions!'' the crowd roared. Amid the chaos,
a Brazilian film crew worked frantically to record the blaze of
color and sound as a backdrop for a new version of the 1959
classic movie Black Orpheus.
Carnival experts said little-known Grande Rio school also
had a good chance with its tribute to a famous Brazilian
communist Luiz Carlos Prestes. It raised eyebrows by swapping
semi-clad women for muscular men on its opening float.
A panel of judges was due to announce the Carnival parade
winners Wednesday.
In the rest of Brazil, the party raged on. In the
northeastern city of Recife, vast crowds packed into the
cobblestoned streets of the historic Olinda neighborhood to
dance to energetic ``frevo'' brass bands.
And in Salvador, also in the northeast, hundreds of
thousands of revelers leaped about behind trucks blasting out
the music of pop bands from huge walls of speakers.
Newspapers said Afro-Brazilian groups protested what they
consider the gradual eradication of local culture by the
amplified ``axe'' music that is all the rage in Brazil.
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